CHAPTER 1 #2
The note had been folded in the front pocket of the pack, and he had felt the corner of it when he zipped her up. He read it sitting there with the wipers going.
Daisy was reading a grade ahead of the room, out of a chair pulled to the window.
She had not spoken out loud in that classroom since the fall, not to Finch and not to the aide, though she talked to Ruthie Dawson at recess in an ordinary voice.
Would he come by after school one day this week.
There was no hurry, the note said, and then, under that, but do come.
He folded it along the same folds and put it in the door pocket with the fuel receipts.
By three he had two pairs turned into the home meadow, a bum calf taking a bottle at the fence, and a gate hinge sprung out of the post where the pair had crowded it.
He wired the hinge, because a new one was in Bozeman and Bozeman was forty minutes each way.
Daisy sat in the truck with the door open and drew and did not talk, and every so often he came up out of the work and counted her there.
The wind swung north around five and the wet came with it, snow that hit the mud and quit being snow.
He was carrying the calf bottle up to the porch when headlights came off Six Mile Road and turned in at the cattle guard. The lane is a quarter mile of nothing. He had a long time to watch them come.
The Buick was Loretta Gable’s. Nobody else in the county drove that slow on purpose.
There was somebody in the passenger seat.
Daisy came out and put her shoulder against the porch post and stood there with her arms folded up inside her sleeves. Levi’s jar of creek rocks sat where it sat at the north end of the rail, and the snow was gathering on the lid of it.
Loretta got out first, in a good coat, her reading glasses swinging on their chain. The passenger door opened and a woman came out of it with a covered dish held against her front in a dish towel, and the porch light got about that far and quit.
Copper-blond hair up in a knot with a pencil through it. Freckles across the nose that the light found before it found anything else.
Four years ago this April he had buried his wife and his son, and three weeks after that he had said a thing to Clara Gables in that barn he could not take back and could not, now, repeat. He remembered the sound of his own voice. He did not remember one word that was in it.
“Wyatt Miller. This is Clara Gables, which you know.”
“Loretta,” he said.
“Clara,” Clara said at the same time, to Daisy. Daisy looked at her and did not answer, and Clara took that without any fuss and turned her shoulder so the child had a way out of it.
Then she looked at the calf bottle on the rail.
“That’s gone cold,” she said. “He won’t take it cold.”
“He took it at three.”
“He took it warm at three.”
“Sink of hot water, then, before you go out again. It doesn’t take as long as boiling it.”
Wyatt put the flat of his hand against the glass. It was cold as the rail it stood on, and he would be out in the dark warming it again at eight o’clock.
“We came around by the county road, which is nine miles longer, and whose idea was that? Not mine. I don’t require a grown woman to explain her route to me.
” Loretta got up onto the first step and stopped there.
“Now. You have Nora Finch worried. You have Harlan Cobb telling the whole feed store you are calving by yourself. And you have two hundred and forty head to get on the ground before the grass comes. What that child needs is a nanny. Do I say that like it’s a dirty word? I do not.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Because it is not a dirty word. It is a woman in the kitchen at four in the morning so a man can be in his barn at four in the morning. Is that charity? It is not. It is a wage, and there is a person standing in your yard who has run a preschool room in a city and is at loose ends until her mother’s house sells. ”
“Loretta,” Clara said.
“I am not finished, dear.”
“You were finished at the cattle guard.”
The snow came down between the three of them and did not lie on anything.
“Eight weeks of somebody in my house. No.”
“I’m not somebody,” Clara said.
She had not moved off the bottom step. She had both arms up under the dish and she was looking at him straight on, which she had done since she was six years old and had never been talked out of.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“It’s what you said. You can say the shorter one too, if you’d rather. It’s your yard and it’s your daughter, and I’d have said something short myself.”
“Clara.”
“I didn’t ask to come. She told me we were delivering a casserole.
” She glanced sideways at Loretta with no heat in it whatsoever.
“Which we are. It’s chicken and rice, and there’s foil on it because the oven runs hot on Larkspur Street.
Somebody is going to buy that house and learn that the expensive way. ”
“You’re selling.”
“The sign went in as soon as the ground would take it.”
“How long have you been home?”
“Since February.” She shifted her grip under the towel. “You’ve been to town four times since February. I’ve seen that truck outside the feed store and I’ve seen it outside the school and I have never yet seen the driver of it.”
“I’ve been calving.”
“I know what you’ve been doing. Everybody in the valley knows what you’ve been doing, and not a single one of them will say it to you, which is the trouble with the valley.” She came up one step. “Take this off me. It’s heavy and it’s hot and I’d rather not wear it home.”
He set the bottle down and put his hands out under the dish, and his hands closed over hers instead, both of them, through the towel. The dish was hot through the cloth. It was hot enough that a man ought to have taken it and stepped away.
He counted. One.
He did not let go on one.
He let go on two, and got the dish squared up on his forearms, and his pulse was going in his own ears like he had come at a run from a long way off.
“It’s my mother’s dish. I’d like it back sometime, if you can stand to bring it.”
“I’ll wash it.”
“Okay.” She put her hands down in her coat pockets. “That wasn’t what I asked you, but okay. It’s a good dish. It has been to every funeral in this county and it has come home from every one of them, and I’d like to keep the record clean.”
There was a sentence after that one. He had the front of it in his mouth and it got as far as her name, and then the wind came around the corner of the house and he let the rest of it go with the snow.
Loretta looked at the pair of them over the top of her glasses. She did not raise her voice. She had gotten sixty-eight years down the road without raising it.
“Well,” she said. “The dish came, anyway, and that is more than some people manage. I am at the community hall Thursday, and I will not bring this up again before Friday. Clara, dear.”
“Good night, Daisy,” Clara said, and to Wyatt she said nothing at all, which he had coming.
They backed around by the shop and went out the lane, and the taillights held up a second at the cattle guard, and then they went off toward the county road and not down toward Mill Creek.
He stood out in the yard with the dish against his chest until it stopped being warm. That took longer than he wanted, and then it was over faster than that.
Inside, the kitchen was dark except for the light above the stove. He set the dish on the counter beside the calving book with the pencil through the wire, and he stood there with a hand on either side of it.
Daisy was on the stairs. Fourth step, in the dark, chin on her knees. She had been there a while.
She spoke first, which she did for nobody else.
“Why did you tell her no?”